"The Crabfish", an English folk song with ribald lyrics,[3] has had sanitized versions released in which the lobster grabs the wife by the nose[4] or where the actual wounds are only implied by the rhyme.[5]

A Boston-area ban on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! – owing to a short motel sex scene – prompted the author to assemble a 150-volume fig-leaf edition with the nine offending pages blacked out as a publicity stunt.[7][8]

Many Internet message boards and forums use automatic wordfiltering to block offensive words and phrases from being published or automatically amend them to more innocuous substitutes such as asterisks or nonsense. This often catches innocent words also: see Scunthorpe problem.